Her Life, an Assortment of Sound
by seeing-is-believing
Summary: 'Her life is a blurred array of distant and forgotten events, marked by the sounds that make up her existence.' AU A short story inspired by the-shiny-girl's 'In The Dark'


_This was inspired by 'In The Dark' by the-shiny-girl (a brilliant story, by the way!). I thought 'If Hermione couldn't see then what would her life be like if all she knew was sound?' and somehow came up with this. Despite the inspiration, it's very different to 'In The Dark' in that the style is completely opposite and that there isn't much mention of Lucius Malfoy (a little at the end but it never actually mentions his name)._

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><p>*:•.-:¦:-•*<em><strong>Her Life, an Assortment of Sound<strong>_*:•.-:¦:-•*

ooo

Her life is a blurred array of distant and forgotten events, marked by the sounds that make up her existence.

She knows not of the technicality behind each tone; nothing of harmony and melody, pitch or sonority, and she can hardly distinguish between alto and soprano. It's what she has come to recognise above the darkness that blocks her vision, trapping her in a world of sounds and voices.

It's what she has become. A fragile shell of a girl, stuck on a broken record of hopelessness and tragedy.

ooo

Murmuring. A sound she associates with everything that happened before.

In the memories she keeps away from prying minds, deep inside the mishandled box of noise her mind has become, a part is labelled under this sound.

Everything found there is a murmur, a low distant humming of voices and howling, whispers and shrieking. Found here is the first time she set foot onto the soil of the Wizarding World, her first encounter with Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley on the Hogwarts Express, and countless weekends in Hogsmeade, sharing a Butterbeer with her best friends.

But the memories do not always share a sense of happiness. There are some of true, loving value and there are others with a more painful message, the death of Cedric Diggory, when she was Petrified in her second year… There kept there too and the murmurs in those memories leave a stinging pain in her ears.

She thinks of this part of her life as a sort of clock that was soundlessly ticking away, counting down the seconds to when the murmuring would suddenly stop and she would be confined to a life of many other noises.

Sometimes she talks to herself, a hushed whisper of a song lyric, a soft recital of spells or potion ingredients. And sometimes she hears a distant murmur inside her head, and she knows the murmuring is her only escape from the abundance of other sounds she keeps locked away.

ooo

Silence. That horrible, dead sound.

Hermione remembers it the day when Harry Potter died, when it was only the beginning of the tangled mess her life would become. She remembers an uproar of curses, then nothing. The entire Wizarding World stood in silence for mere moments after the Boy-Who-Lived fell, a second of no noise.

This silence is a painful sound to her ears, an empty wave of oblivion, a drawn out tone of fear. This other type of silence comes on the days when her sobs are so heavy that she cannot expel a single noise, after a wave of screeching, and shouting, laughing and whispered incantations of curses too unspeakable for her mind to grasp concept of. Hermione never thought that she, a Know-It-All, would be unable to come to terms with such a simple logic, but some things are too unthinkable to her.

Hermione knows that this is the silence to be afraid of.

The silence that kills.

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Silence. The sound of nothing and everything.

A rare and mystical sound. Hermione knows it's not really a sound, but to her it seems to be. It's almost been forgotten by her delicate ear drums, but in the darkness of her mind, when the dreams and images of her crumbling life have come to a short stop, silence runs through her veins in a wave of peace and calmness.

Something like heaven, or so she believes.

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Screaming. The sound of agony, of pain and torture.

When the men in dark robes and glistening marks are having fun, stripping her of her dignity, clothes and identity, her mind and lungs betray her and all she can do is scream, scream, scream. She screams in desperation and in false hope as their hands abuse her; rough, calloused fingertips pressing against her as if she's something to be played with.

She sees herself as a rag doll; limbs flailing hopelessly, body and voice ignoring what her pride is telling her, as curses strike in a colourful parade of incoherent flashes that she doesn't see.

The men don't understand the fragility of human life, nor do they appreciate it, and because of this they do not hear her screams.

Her loud, powerless screams.

ooo

Laughter.

The sound of happiness, love and joy, the sound of Ron and Harry, of Ginny and Luna, her mother and father. She used to be surrounded by laughter; the giggling of first years in the Gryffindor common room, her own nervous chortles when Ron gave a foolhardy remark, an unstoppable round of laughter at the dinner table, the sort of laughter so intense her stomach muscles would ache after.

She once read that laughter is the music of the heart, and it had been once. Hermione had reserved a piece of her heart for him; her freckled, redhead friend. Her Ron. She always knew something would prevent such a beautiful relationship from happening, although she believed it would have been in the form of a girl like Lavender Brown, not something as sinister and foreboding as death.

Her laughter died with Ron and Harry and she doesn't laugh anymore. But the sound is hidden secretly in the depths of her battered mind, kept safe with the memories of friendship, love and good times.

ooo

Crying. The sound of spilling tears, sadness, sorrow.

Cries of pain, fright, or melancholy.

She cries, alone, as she remembers the life she used to have, the halls of Hogwarts, the streets of Diagon Alley… Occasionally she cries in a state of self-loathing, hating herself for not trying harder to win the war, for not doing anything to save her best friends from a cold death. Her cries echo in the emptiness of the room she's trapped in and in her black, empty mind.

She knows there's not much use in crying; they never stop hurting her when she cries, and not even after her breathless pleads. Crying is futile but she can't help the heart-wrenching sobs from coming so violently they shake her tiny frame or from ringing in her ears so painfully.

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Talking.

His voice. Mocking, ruthless, hurling insults about her blood, her current indisposition. _Mudblood_ he calls her, never Hermione. His voice is clipped, proper enunciation of his vowels and she can always hear the sharpness of his well pronounced T's. There's a sound of properness in his speech, the combination of strict parents and wealth, no doubt. He sounds like his son, especially as he hisses the word Mudblood or the quick incantation of a Stinging Hex, the Cruciatus Curse… She thinks there's a serpent-like quality to his voice, but nothing in comparison to the sibilance of Voldemort's.

Her own voice. Shaking, wobbling in its tone as she tells him that her blood is the same as his, that she's not weak or useless –her voice defies her.

And it's only his voice that can bring out the assortment of sounds in her.

Sometimes he _murmurs_ things to her, little quiet things they both know he shouldn't be saying.

A hateful _silence_ as she feels his eyes upon her, glaring, or a peaceful _silence_ after she hears the slam of a door, signalling his exit.

He expels the piercing, ear shattering _screams_; the _screams_ that sting her throat afterwards in a pain that she never does quite understand.

_Laughter_. Always his. Never hers. He stands back, watching her, lips curled upwards as a sound, halfway between a _laugh_ and a choke hits her ears and she curls herself tighter into a ball so as to keep the sound away from her, but she always hears it regardless.

Her _cries_ are heard by him, but he makes no sign that he can hear her. Sometimes Hermione thinks that they're opposites; that he can see but can't hear because he never makes any sign that he can hear her screaming or _crying_. But really she knows he can hear her, but he ignores it well. Hermione can't ignore these sounds because she would have nothing left if she did.

His _voice_. Always in her head. Sometimes his voice is the last sound on her mind before she drifts into a state of oblivion, and sometimes, just sometimes, it's the first sound she hears when she wakes up to another day in an assortment of sound.

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><p><em>So there it is! Hope you like and if anyone feels like reviewing, there's a virtual cookie in it for you ;)<em>


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